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Top Tech Trends Gets Tech Right

January 27, 2009 Anyone who has been to LITA's Top Tech Trends meetings at the American Library Association's twice yearly conferences knows that the committtee that runs the show has been trying valiantly to overcome the limitations of hotels and the technologies themselves to create more interactive meetings. This time they got it right.

Admittedly, as Jason Griffey pointed out, at least part of the success of the event this time was robust wireless in the hotel -- something almost unheard of in conference hotels in the past. Robust wireless was required because one of the technologies the committee used was Ustream -- live video streaming.

But that was just one channel of communication. Anyone could Twitter, and use the #ttt09 hashtag to mark their tweets. These tweets would then also show up automatically in the CoverItLive.com blog, which could be viewed either directly on the CoverItLive site or embedded in the LITA blog. Cindi Trainor was taking pictures throughout, and posting them to the live blog, as well as twittering main points (as did others). During the session, I and others would post URLs of things being discussed.

The upshot is this:
  1. During the event, people who could not attend in person could attend virtually -- from near or far. One attendee was watching from the Outer Hebrides, someone was there from their living room in San Francisco, while another was nursing a hurt foot in a nearby hotel room. All of them would not have been able to participate otherwise.
  2. People in the room could comment, post URLs, or otherwise participate in a way other than asking a question.
  3. By the time the event ended, it was already fully recorded and available on the web.
Overall, it was a great demonstration of how to use the latest technologies to expand an event both in the room and out of it, while leaving behind a complete record of the event without having to spend a lot of extra time doing it. It was a pleasure to see the committee in action, and to have experienced the day when it all came together. Major kudos for Maurice York (chair), Cindi Trainor, and Jason Griffey.

Posted by Roy Tennant on January 27, 2009 | Comments (3)


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January 30, 2009
In response to: Top Tech Trends Gets Tech Right
Oleg commented:

I was there, it was great, although the room was a bit too small. Great topics, good discussions.

Oleg
www.latcorp.com







January 30, 2009
In response to: Top Tech Trends Gets Tech Right
Cindi Trainor commented:

Thanks for the kudos, Roy. Using Cover It Live (coveritlive.com) was fun and easy. Unfortunately, the free version only allows the addition of up to 10 twitter IDs, so in order to see all the tweets tagged #ttt09, you'll have to visit either Twitter Search (search.twitter.com) or the LITA &




January 30, 2009
In response to: Top Tech Trends Gets Tech Right
Cindi Trainor commented:

(previous was cut off when I typed the captcha wrong. How does one discern between a capital c and small C in san serif??) ...BIGWIG room on Friendfeed (friendfeed.com/rooms/lita-bigwig).

There was also a snag with Twitter--for some reason (probably a problem with Twitter itself), tweets from some people did not show in the live blog, then tweets stopped altogether. The live blog from the LITA Town Hall meeting is a better example of integrated tweets. You can see both archived live blogs on litablog.org.

Big thanks also go out to TTT Committee members Kevin Herrera and Jason Battles for transmitting the session via the live blog and twitter and to Bonnie Buzzell for the handout and for being awesome generally. :)

ps to LJ: it's a pain to have to write comments so that they pass html muster. This is THE WEB. Comments should be allowed to have links; it's incumbent on site owners to use spam filtering that doesn't create barriers to real comments, thus hampering conversation. :-/





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